The Teleological Argument (p4)

Joshua260 said:

Design greatly explains why the most unlikely reality, the existence of a universe that is life-permitting, could be realized.

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If the odds for something to be the way it is are extremely low, the odds for it to be designed that way are equally extremely low.
Unless, of course, your main - but hidden - question begging premise was "It was intended to be the way it is" all the way.

bhsmte said:

Inductive reasoning is used in science to form theories and hypothesis which can then make predictions and be tested. Since ID to date, is not falsifiable and has no clear definition we can't even get to this point of hypothesis and certainly no scientific theory, which Michael Behe had to admit during the Dover trial while under oath.

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Okay, how about String Theory?

I think your blanket statement about falsifiability and what is Science is not quite as cut-and-dry as you would like to think.

Consider these thoughts related to fine-tuning, String Theory, and falsifiability from a recent article that I will provide the link for below:

This [fine-tuning] is called the “anthropic principle,” and if you think it feels like a cosmic punt, you’re not alone. Researchers have been trying to underpin our apparent stroke of luck with hard science for decades. String theory suggests a solution: It predicts that our universe is just one among a multitude of universes, each with its own fundamental constants. If the cosmic lottery has played out billions of times, it isn’t so remarkable that the winning numbers for life should come up at least once.

In fact, you can reason your way to the “multiverse” in at least four different ways, according to MIT physicist Max Tegmark’s accounting. The tricky part is testing the idea. You can’t send or receive messages from neighboring universes, and most formulations of multiverse theory don’t make any testable predictions. Yet the theory provides a neat solution to the fine-tuning problem. Must we throw it out because it fails the falsifiability test?

"It would be completely non-scientific to ignore that possibility just because it doesn’t conform with some preexisting philosophical prejudices,” says Sean Carroll, a physicist at Caltech, who called for the “retirement” of the falsifiability principle in a controversial essay for Edge last year. Falsifiability is “just a simple motto that non-philosophically-trained scientists have latched onto,” argues Carroll.

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Maybe String theory could be used to argue against this teleological argument. Oh, but darn, it fails to qualify as "scientific".

Although such scientists are right to warn against abandoning the importance of falsifiability, the notion you suggest of making it a requirement for deeming a discussion like ours scientific they see as equally wrong and ultimately too simplistic for the needs of real truth seekers.

Perhaps “falsifiability” isn’t up to shouldering the full scientific and philosophical burden that’s been placed on it. “Sean is right that ‘falsifiability’ is a crude slogan that fails to capture what science really aims at,” argues MIT computer scientist Scott Aaronson, writing on his blog Shtetl Optimized.

Carroll argues that he is simply calling for greater openness and honesty about the way science really happens. “I think that it’s more important than ever that scientists tell the truth. And the truth is that in practice, falsifiability is not a good criterion for telling science from non-science,” he says.

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Clearly there is too much to be gained by looking for the reasonability in what could turn out to be strong evidence favoring a concept that we don't know yet how to falsify.

“I think falsifiability is not a perfect criterion, but it’s much less pernicious than what’s being served up by the ‘post-empirical’ faction,” says Frank Wilczek, a physicist at MIT. “Falsifiability is too impatient, in some sense,” putting immediate demands on theories that are not yet mature enough to meet them. “It’s an important discipline, but if it is applied too rigorously and too early, it can be stifling.

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See http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/blogs/physics/2015/02/falsifiability/

And what about sciences that often seek a similar kind of knowledge of authorship where direct evidence proving who is the real author is almost equally inaccessible. What about Archaeology, where a scientist attempts to attribute some scrolls or carvings to a particular person or civilization and in a particular time period? Or Musicology, where the same might be done to determine who composed a piece newly found in someone's attic but written hundreds of years ago? How would their theories about authorship be falsified scientifically, since even a living person could sit down and scribble something similar before our eyes and claim he is the author ... yet still be lying? The archaeologist may have lots of evidence in terms of elements of style, design, process, ... the location and geology around his find, etc., and all of it may point to a rational conclusion about what civilization likely authored it ... but there is no way to conclusively falsify his claim without somehow falsifying his evidence (which could be done with ID as well).

Are those no longer Science either?

With some careful thought and cooperation, I don't see why it would be impossible to come to a reasonable agreement on what constitutes design, even if we primarily use what we know about neurological processes and studies of cognitive functions during what we call the "creative process". Those processes have results. And those results differ from what we see when no attempt to create or organize is being made (e.g., destructive forces). Like the archaeologist, one can use clues ... the tracks in the sand, so to speak, which give rise to a clear, rational conclusion about the thing that caused the tracks. Design causes tracks. Design must mean something, and have a definition. Between these things, I see no reason why a similar kind of proof using empirical evidence and inductive reasoning as the archaeologist might use cannot also be used to show ID.

Finally, with all this weight you are trying to put on science, don't forget that the final goal is always to move ourselves away from the lesser rational or reasonable beliefs, and onto the more rational ones ... falsifiable or not. Certainly, in any case we have to define what the heck we are talking about, whether that is a "designed universe" or a universe that "organized itself" (whatever that means). But with regard to theories about things that happened in the past as opposed to theories about "the way things work now", almost always you are going to have a lot of room for doubt, some difficulty proving or falsifying what happened. So we are primarily interested in stacking the evidence and aligning our "faith" in a theory with whatever is holding the greatest probability based on that evidence.

In my view the more science digs deep and finds greater complexity and intricacy in the universe (even as it also finds some simplicity and elegance), the evidence stacks in favor of an intelligence much greater than ours as its author. And let's not be too quick to discount the validity of inductive reasoning towards that effort. As one writer puts it on a web site dedicated to your own point of view concerning God:

It may seem that inductive arguments are weaker than deductive arguments because there must always remain the possibility of their arriving at false conclusions, but that is not entirely true. With deductive arguments, our conclusions are already contained, even if implicitly, in our premises. This means that we don't arrive at new information - at best, we are shown information which was obscured or unrecognized previously. Thus, the sure truth-preserving nature of deductive arguments comes at a cost.

Inductive arguments, on the other hand, do provide us with new ideas and thus may expand our knowledge about the world in a way that is impossible for deductive arguments to achieve. Thus, while deductive arguments may be used most often with mathematics, most other fields of research make extensive use of inductive arguments.

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See http://atheism.about.com/od/criticalthinking/a/deductivearg.htm

But I tried to use the definition that "A universe could not exist with any other values than what the constants currently have." It means the same thing as saying "A universe could not exist if the values were set to anything different than what the constants currently have." And this again is semantically no different than saying "If certain constants varied just a little bit, then the universe would not exist at all".

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Joshua260 said:

But that's not what I'm saying about fine-tuned. I'm saying in regards to fine-tuned that if the constants varied a slight bit, the universe would not be life-permitting.

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I wasn't talking about the definition of fine-tuned in that paragraph above. Look back and you will see that we were only talking about the definition of physical necessity.

Same with your next remark about my subsequent paragraph. It was clearly all about the definition of physical necessity, and then somehow you jumped tracks and are telling me I'm confused about your definition of fine-tuning. Maybe read it again without jumping off of the track of our discussion about physical necessity. And I will also consider your radio example.

paulm50 said:

It's called evolution. Or childbirth. Think it through.

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Okay, I'll think it through like I'm sure you did. Those things don't devise and create the complexity themselves, entire systems are required to push a group or lineage into a new evolutionary direction. And that system already contains the rules and conduits for adaptation when the players come along and simply go through their paces and cycles to make it happen over time.

paulm50 said:

As for a designer, did he design all these trying to get it right?
Homo gautengensis
Homo rudolfensis
Homo habilis
Homo floresiensis
Homo erectus
Homo ergaster
Homo antecessor
Homo heidelbergensis
Homo cepranensis
Homo helmei
Homo palaeojavanicus
Homo tsaichangensis
Homo neanderthalensis
Homo rhodesiensis
Homo sapiens

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Like others have done here, you are assuming that efficiency must be a primary goal in any designer's thinking process. You can't even begin to prove that.

Archaeopteryx said:

Where's the evidence for design?

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Here is a common one. There may be better articles on the same topic than this one, but it is a typical starting point, I suppose.

https://www.apologeticspress.org/apcontent.aspx?category=9&article=1412

Arythmael said:

Here is a common one. There may be better articles on the same topic than this one, but it is a typical starting point, I suppose.

https://www.apologeticspress.org/apcontent.aspx?category=9&article=1412

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Very disappointing. I thought you'd know better than that.

Arythmael said:

Very interesting. Tell me, is evolution falsifiable? If so, how?

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Does it matter? Challenging the scientific status of evolution isn't going to make religious creationism any more scientific.

Arythmael said:

Like others have done here, you are assuming that efficiency must be a primary goal in any designer's thinking process. You can't even begin to prove that.

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This is another example of the lack of testability or falsifiability of creationist ideas. They are so fuzzy that they can shift and change to match anything we might possibly see. Efficient functioning? A designer at work. Inefficient functions? A designer at work. Redundant functions? A designer at work. No functions? The designer didn't want them.

No matter what we see, there's an excuse ready to go. That's great in that it won't get in the way of religious faith in the matter, but pretty bad for making predictions - "a designer could do anything" doesn't really narrow down the possibilities.

Arythmael said:

With some careful thought and cooperation, I don't see why it would be impossible to come to a reasonable agreement on what constitutes design, even if we primarily use what we know about neurological processes and studies of cognitive functions during what we call the "creative process".

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I'll anxiously await creationists to get right on this Very Important research activity.

In my view the more science digs deep and finds greater complexity and intricacy in the universe (even as it also finds some simplicity and elegance), the evidence stacks in favor of an intelligence much greater than ours as its author.

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Why? We all the examples we have of intelligent design are from humans (or maybe other animals). Those examples of design are very distinct from natural processes - that's how we identify things which are human-created from things which occur naturally. I'm not sure how you can use induction based on a distinction between human designed and non-human designed to conclude that the non-designed stuff is designed.

Arythmael said:

Like others have done here, you are assuming that efficiency must be a primary goal in any designer's thinking process. You can't even begin to prove that.

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If you are going to mount an argument from fine-tuning, and thereby invoke the metaphor of an engineer, then efficiency is a relevant consideration.

Joshua260 said:

But that's not what I'm saying about fine-tuned. I'm saying in regards to fine-tuned that if the constants varied a slight bit, the universe would not be life-permitting.

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That assumes that we already know the range of values that is life-permitting. How could we know this?

And why should we focus on life specifically anyway? If the values varied, various other aspects of the universe would be different also, not just life.

Joshua260 said:

I've already answered this earlier in the thread.

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Yes, and I responded to your comments. You haven't justified why we should keep the focus on life specifically.

Joshua260 said:

So if you walked down the beach and found the words "Hi Quatona!" spelled out in seashells, you think that the odds are equal that it could have come about by chance or design? Surely, you jest.

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What would be analogous to "Hi Quatona!" in this comparison?

Arythmael said:

Like others have done here, you are assuming that efficiency must be a primary goal in any designer's thinking process. You can't even begin to prove that.

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Are you assuming the creator is inefficient?

If so his inefficiency knows no bounds. This is one section with a 1-14 chance of getting it right in a strain that survived. Now add the millions of other species and the ones who didn't make it, and it's down to a designer getting it right, is potluck.

I don't have to prove that, evolution proves how it works.

Arythmael said:

Okay, I'll think it through like I'm sure you did. Those things don't devise and create the complexity themselves, entire systems are required to push a group or lineage into a new evolutionary direction. And that system already contains the rules and conduits for adaptation when the players come along and simply go through their paces and cycles to make it happen over time.

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A fetus that isn't perfect dies sometimes taking a less than fit Mother with it, an infant that isn't fit dies, an adolescent that isn't fit dies or fails to reproduce. This is over all species and proving that in a few generations only the best adapted survive and pass on their genes.

Think outside the last few 1,000 years of Man and into the natural world and how species reproduce so only the best survive.

Arythmael said:

Here is a common one. There may be better articles on the same topic than this one, but it is a typical starting point, I suppose.

https://www.apologeticspress.org/apcontent.aspx?category=9&article=1412

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The truth about the evolution of the eye has moved on so much since Darwin. Evolution of the Eye.

Darwin laid down the groundwork that via the process of reproduction, evolution creates species that fit into their environment. Since then we have built so much more knowledge. So when linking from page like this, look at the latest discoveries science has made.